“Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.” – Albert Einstein

As Einstein said, there’s always a maths problem more complicated than yours.Galileo had to fight with the Church over whether or not the Earth revolved around the Sun. This, like many other discoveries, required a sound knowledge of maths.

You mightn’t need to understand maths to this extent. A lot of people can find maths really challenging and think it’s only useful for students studying the sciences or maths.

However, maths can be a very useful skill outside of the classroom whether you’re looking for work as an accountant, trying to work out how to save money at the supermarket, or when you have to divide the bill at the end of a meal.

Maths teaches us how to deal with numbers, how to calculate and figure out a number of problems that occur in everyday life when it comes to anything numerical.

Do you still have nightmares about long division or the times tables?

Do you panic when you hear “quadratic equations”?

How can you gain a mastery of maths about losing your mind?

In this article, we’re going to explain some of the tricks and techniques you should use to figure out what maths is all about. It’s much easier when you think about maths as a useful and logical system of skills that can teach you how to solve so many problems without any difficulty.

Is Studying Maths Easy?

It’s true that maths is often thought of as one of the most complicated subjects you’ll learn at school. That said, I bet you can do 25 x 4 without any problems!

There are plenty of different branches of maths. (Source: geralt)

A lot of people struggle when it comes to adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing numbers in their head. Of course, you can practise this (who doesn’t love a good multiplication table?) and be taught certain strategies to make these operations simpler.

In truth, you can easily learn maths if you’re using the right techniques. You have to make sure the techniques match your objectives which could be:

Just like in other subjects like geography or history, you sometimes will have to learn things off by heart in maths.

What’s the point?

No matter what level of maths you’re studying, you’ll still cover all aspects of maths.

“When it comes to academic support, I teach my students to memorise the multiplication tables and ask them to add and subtract in their head as quickly as they can. This is useful when tackling larger maths problems,” Sarah, private maths tutor.

Of course, some problems are more difficult than others. It goes without saying that find the answer to addition and subtraction problems is easier than doing multiplication and division. That said, if you’re always counting on your calculator to do all the heavy lifting when it comes to problem-solving, you’ll never get any better at doing maths in your head.

Certain types of problems won’t be covered at all in school and mightn’t be seen until you study maths at university and when it comes to learning maths, you need to choose your learning methods based on:

Your knowledge of basic maths

Your reasons for learning maths

The level of maths you need to reach

The time you have to learn

Your learning objectives

So let’s have a look at the different learning techniques.

How to Teach Yourself Maths Quickly

A lot of people either hate maths or struggle with it. However, it’s one of the most important subjects on the curriculum and can still play an important role in your life even if you don’t use it at work.

Establish what you know with the help of a teacher. You’ll soon see if you’re familiar with polynomials or not.

List your strengths and weaknesses: you may be a visual or aural learner so make sure you adapt your learning techniques. An aural learner may find word problems easier while there’s a high probability that a visual learner will excel at geometry or analysing a graph.

Make revision sheets at the end of each chapter and make sure you regularly test yourself with a short quiz or a worksheet. This can do wonders for your confidence as well as showing you whether you need to give yourself some extra homework on certain topics.

A maths lesson or private maths tutorial will always have the same objective of helping you progress in a given maths topic:

While there’s no simple equation for become a master of maths, your answer will depend on what you’re learning. You should be confident, learn with mind maps, and rephrase problems in your own words. Saying the problems aloud will also help you solve them.

If you’re studying for an exam like the GRE (Global Reasoning Exam, a maths certification that can be useful for getting research grants), it can be quite daunting.

If you’re considering studying alone, it still might be useful enlisting the help of a mathematician to teach you an effective methodology for studying.

Whether you’re learning with or without a tutor, there are ways to make studying maths easier. You just need to be committed and organised and it’ll all work out!